


Okay

by ljs



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 14:46:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3814429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ljs/pseuds/ljs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A vignette, set a few days after the Season 2 finale "Tempus Fugit."</p><p>He dislikes worrying her. She takes care of him anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Okay

“Doing okay?”

Ichabod looked up at Abbie’s words. She stood there in the doorway of the cabin, holding a sack of ‘fast’ food and gazing at him with warm, worried eyes.

He disliked worrying her. Indeed, over the past few days he had endeavoured to hide his own unhappiness – almost a return of the disorientation he had felt upon waking in this century – over the loss of a wife he hadn’t really known and a son who had never been his. Part of the unhappiness was guilt, he knew, because he paradoxically wasn’t as unhappy as his reason told him he should be.

And so he stood, and smiled, and said, “Of course, lieutenant. May I help you with that?”

“Nope. I got it, Crane.” She strode into the cabin as she strode everywhere, her strength and efficiency compensating for her short stature. He tried his best to look away from the way her trousers molded to her… form.

His best wasn’t very good. She was so lovely.

Swallowing words he shouldn’t say and feelings he couldn’t quite acknowledge to himself, he went to the door and shut it on the twilight world outside.

“Was there any difficulty in town?” he said.

“Nope again. Everything quiet for the moment.” She put the food on the table. “Saw Reyes while I was out. She’s ready for me to come back to work full-time. And, um… she wants to talk to you, too.”

“More inquisitive conversations? More threats? I’ve been reading about ongoing unjust harassment of the citizenry in this country, although I am not, what do you say, in the proper demographic to be a target, as it is people of a darker hue who are wrongly–"

“Shut up.” She pointed to a chair as if to silently add a command for him to sit down. “It’s not bad, what Reyes wants.”

“I trust your judgment, Lieutenant.” He looked at the hamburgers she was taking out of the bag, thought of blood, pushed the thought away. “I’ll fetch the plates and silverware.”

“And a beer would be nice,” she said.

“At your service.”

The small task made him feel slightly better, more in control, until he used the opener on the beer bottles. For some reason the clatter of the small metal tops made him flash back to the clatter of a knife on a wooden floor, to the disappearance of Miss Mills into a time he no longer belonged, to his own loneliness and despair at her loss.

She is returned, he told himself. She is here now. The Witnesses are together.

When he got back to the table with his burden, she was seated, waiting for him. “Come on, sit down,” she said, taking the plates as she spoke and pushing out his chair with her foot. He marked the delicacy and strength of that foot, almost absently. She wore the most ridiculous of heels on her workday boots, and yet she was still so tiny. When he embraced her, as Witnesses, as friends, she nestled so well against his heart….

He sat down so hard that beer slopped over his hand. “Oh well,” he said, and after he handed one bottle to her, he followed the custom of these barbarous times and licked the spillage off his fingers.

When he looked up, she was gazing at him. God in heaven (for He was not here), her eyes were deep enough for a man to lose himself.

“Crane. Ichabod.” She wetted her lips with her tongue, and he almost groaned aloud. Then she smiled. “Captain.”

“Not here and now, Lieutenant.” He smiled in return. “I do not outrank you in this century.”

“Your rank came in handy when I was back in your century,” she said, laughing.

“Not my century any longer.” He took a long drink of the beer – which did taste different than ale had done in the 1770s, but still good.

“That’s right,” she said. “This is your century now, too.”

Because you are here, he thought. Because I am with you.

She hooked that ridiculous heel of hers on the rung of his chair. They often connected themselves that way, he realized: a hand or a foot on a piece of furniture, a touch of shoulder or thigh, a shared smile. He relied on their connection.

“Want to split the fries?” she said.

“Yes, please,” he said.

And as she plated their food, sharing it between them, he smiled. He had Abbie. Indeed, he was doing okay.


End file.
